Dana Gioia

The
Rise of James Fenton

James
Fenton's rapid rise to literary fame in the 1980s served as
a climax to the emergence of a new generation of English poets
brought to wide attention by the publication of two influential
and competitive anthologies, Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion's Contemporary British Poetry (1982) and Michael Schmidt's Some Contemporary Poets of Britain and Ireland (1983).
One of the few writers prominently featured in both collections,
Fenton represented to many critics the best qualities of the
new wave of poets. In Seamus Heaney's canny description, the
young poets were "highly self-conscious … anticonfessional,
detached, laconic, and strangely popular considering their
various devices for keeping the reader at arm's length." Fenton's
literary importance, however, ultimately transcended his position
as herald to a new generation. While the exuberant energy
and consummate assurance of both tone and technique immediately
distinguished his work, his qualities were in no way superficial.
He was unsurpassed among his contemporaries in terms of range,
skill, and intelligence, but it was ultimately the sheer excellence
of his poetry that gradually but ineluctably earned him the
position of the major British poet of his generation.

Fenton's
unique accomplishment has been to create a diversity of public
formswhich range from political poetry to light verse,
from narrative to lyricwithout compromising the integrity
and concentration of his work. His mature poetry achieves an
attractive balance between formal perfection and exciting, frequently
unexpected content. He has employed an impressive variety of
forms from traditional rhymed stanzas to deliberately prosaic
free verse. Indeed his poems are distinguished from those of
his contemporaries by the unusually high polish of their style
and the inclusive interest of their subjects. But Fenton's originality
lies not so much in his formal or thematic invention as his
particular gift for combining traditional elements in powerful
and often unprecedented ways. This talent has enabled him to
transform moribund literary genres such as the allegory, didactic
epistle, verse satire, and pastoral eclogue into vital contemporary
forms. Fenton is also an unusually entertaining and intelligent
poet with an ability to engage the reader's attention. He has
written difficult, even obscure poems which nonetheless have
proved popular and emotionally accessible. Not surprisingly,
these qualities have won him an audience beyond the narrow readership
of contemporary poetry.

James
Martin Fenton was born in Lincoln in 1949, the son of Mary
Hamilton Ingoldby Fenton and John Charles Fenton, an Anglican
priest and theologian, who was also a collateral descendant
of Elijah Fenton (1683-1730), a minor Augustan poet best remembered
as one of Alexander Pope's collaborators in translating the Odyssey. Fenton's family moved twice during his childhood,
first to Yorkshire and later to Lichfield, Staffordshire,
the town which would provide the sinister background for his
poem "A Staffordshire Murderer." At the age of nine Fenton
was sent to a musical preparatory school attached to the Durham
cathedral, where he was a chorister. The importance of this
early musical training can hardly be overstated. Fentons
conception of poetryexcept for a few early experimentshas
remained steadfastly auditory and performative. Four years
later he entered Repton, a public school in Derbyshire. Graduating
from Repton, he spent six months at the British Institute
in Florence, before starting at Magdalen College, Oxford,
in 1967. At Oxford Fenton began reading in English under the
tutelage of poet John Fuller, who was to become both his literary
mentor and close friend. Fenton, however, soon became dissatisfied
with English. Wanting to study anthropology (for which Oxford
had no formal undergraduate degree), he switched to "PPP"
(philosophy, psychology, physiology) as a preparatory course.

All
young poets have early influences, but only a few have single
ravishing passions. In a weak poet, such early fixation can
stunt creative growth, but for a strong imagination une
grande passion can focus and clarify artistic development.
At Repton, Fenton discovered the poetry of W. H. Auden, which
would prove the most important influence on his own work.
Significantly, his reading began with Auden's more didactic
and discursive later work. (The first volume he read was About
the House, which appeared in England in 1966, Fentons
last year at public school.) Auden's influence was not hard
to come by at Repton, which had not only educated Auden's
father but also Christopher Isherwood. Repton's church, St.
Wystan's, had even inspired Auden's Christian name. The young
Fenton's literary acquaintance with the work of the elder
poet was reinforced by a personal encounter when Auden accepted
an invitation to read at his patron saint's school. Their
meeting began a sporadic friendship between the poets that
lasted until Auden's death in 1973.

Fenton
has defended this early infatuation with Auden as a positive
influence on his development. "I think of Auden as the starting
point, " he told Grevel Lindop in an interview. "I was perfectly
happy to imitate Auden at times and to follow what seemed
to me a possible program he had set for poets, a possible
area of interest they might include in their poetry, a possible
way of writing a line." At Oxford, he would not have been
dissuaded from this program by Fuller, who at that time was
writing the first version of his comprehensive and sympathetic
critical manual, A Reader's Guide to W. H. Auden (1970).
Fuller's own poetry, which is so distinguished by its wit,
intelligence, and technical brilliance, even offered a model
of how Auden's influence could be profitably incorporated.

Like
his mentors, Auden and Fuller, Fenton's poetic development
proved extremely precocious. In 1968 during his first year
at Oxford he won that years Newdigate Prize, an award
given for the best poem by an undergraduate on a set subject.
His winning sonnet sequence, Our Western Furniture,
was then broadcast on the BBC's Third Programme and published
as a pamphlet by Fuller's Sycamore Press. The theme for the
Newdigate competition had been set by Edmund Blunden, then
the Oxford Professor of Poetry. It was "the opening of Japan,
1853-54," a subject about which the young Fenton knew nothing.
With a determination and intellectual self-confidence that
presaged the poets later career in political journalism,
theater reviewing, and art criticism, Fenton immersed himself
in Japanese history and produced a remarkable sequence of
twenty-one sonnets and two haiku (a characteristically audacious
combination of disparate forms calculated to hit exactly the
composition's maximum length of 300 lines). Although awkward
in spots, Fenton's sequence remains an amazing performance
for a teenager, displaying both the technical proficiency
and the wide-ranging intellectual interests that would become
his trademarks. It also showed the beginning of the poet's
fascination with besieged native cultures.

The
theme of Our Western Furniture is the mutually incomprehensible
meeting of brash imperialistic America and tottering imperial
Japan in the mid-nineteenth century. The sequence loosely
follows the career of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry, who
forcibly opened Japan to foreign trade in 1853 after 250 years
of almost complete isolation. Beginning just before the arrival
of the American fleet in Uraga harbor, the sequence ends with
Perry's death in New York in 1858. Most of the sonnets take
the form of monologues by major or minor characters on both
sides of the drama, including Commodore Perry, President Millard
Fillmore, the first American consul to Japan, Townsend Harris,
and Yezaimon, the governor of Uraga, with the ghost of the
Japanese poet, Basho, acting as a Tiresias-like chorus.

The
story of Our Western Furniture moves dialectically
from one point of view to another revealing how the same situations
were perceived differently by Japanese and American participants.
Although he does not idealize Japanese culture, Fenton's sympathies
in the poem rest with Japan. (Old empires always appeal to
modern poets more than new ones.) The Americans, except for
Harris, are blind to the complex realities of Japan and intoxicated
with a jingoistic sense of their nation's historical destiny.
The Japanese, by contrast, are more sophisticated are perspicacious.
Fenton underscores the differences between the cultures throughout
the poem but nowhere more tellingly than in the exchange of
gifts between the two sides. Unabashedly proud of their technological
achievements, the Americans present a locomotive, a telegraph,
and modern guns to the puzzled Japanese and receive, much
to their disgust, only flowered cloth, teapots, writing instruments,
and paper. This exchange foreshadows the ultimate outcome
of the American intrusion. Despite their gracious ancient
culture, the Japanese, as they themselves soon realize, are
powerless to stop history. After the Americans land, Yezaimon
reflects on Americas youthful strength:

Your
newborn countrys growing potency
Bursts like spring rivers through surrounding plains.
You pick on us as sparring partner, try
Our strength, but find us hopeless at your game.
Sensing your strengthening sinews with delight
You give us guns, and challenge us to fight.

Around
the time he was finishing Our Western Furniture, Fenton
began another poetic experiment. His notion was to expand
contemporary poetic language by finding examples of scientific
writing that displayed the precision and richness of poetic
diction. He assembled his discoveries both as found poems
in free verse (the sequence "Exempla" in The Memory of
War) and as traditional poems which incorporated scientific
language in a manner reminiscent of Marianne Moore (as in
"The Fruit-Grower in War Time" or "The P.H. Rivers Museum,
Oxford" from Terminal Moraine). "In the days I was
writing them," Fenton told Andrew Motion in an interview,
"one of the things I found particularly seductive was scientific
language, the way it used familiar words in an unfamiliar
way, or completely unfamiliar wordsgreat clusters of
them, so that the mind would just have to ride for a while,
while these sounds just came. That's obviously a way towards
finding, in non-poetic language, what can be the poetic language
of the future....Poetic language is very much denatured and
overworked, and it needs a new fertilizer."

Even
the richest fertilizer, however, does not guarantee flowers.
And Fenton's "Exempla" stand as interesting failures; even
their author now admits he considers them "heroic first attempts."
However arresting in their originality, "Exempla"
are ultimately dull and aridly cerebral with neither rhythmic
vitality nor emotional impact. Intellectual scope and ambition,
Fenton would learnunlike many of his American contemporariesdoes
not guarantee imaginative vitality. Despite their shortcomings,
however, "Exempla" bear an important relationship
to his mature poetry. They show that even as an undergraduate
Fenton was determined to work non-literary language and material
into his poetry. The "Exempla" also demonstrate his early
fascination with the clinical and objective tone of scientific
writinga very Audenesque impulse that the younger poet
put to new uses. Later, Fenton would find that by employing
this tone on the less recalcitrant subjects of history and
politics (in poems like "Dead Soldiers" and "Chosun") he could
successfully transmute seemingly nonliterary material into
striking poetry.

In
1970, Fenton graduated from Oxford after getting what he jokingly
termed "the best third" in his year"namely the most
borderline." Deciding on a career in journalism, he wrote
as a freelance for six months and then in 1971 joined the
staff of New Statesman. Working first on the literary
pages, he soon switched to the politics. The next year at
the age of only twenty-two, he published his first full-length
collection, Terminal Moraine (1972), and soon after
won a Gregory Award. Wanting to become a foreign correspondent
but unable to secure a position, he decided to use the Gregory
money to travel to Vietnam and Cambodia as a freelance reporter.
Like Auden, who had gone off to cover the Sino-Japanese War,
Fenton consciously threw himself in the path of history. But
unlike the elder poet, Fenton was initially unable to turn
his experiences into poetry. Indeed during the next five years,
as the precocious poet became a seasoned political correspondent,
he virtually stopped writing serious verse.

Arriving
in Indochina in 1973 just as the American forces were withdrawing
from Vietnam, Fenton witnessed the collapse of the Lon Nol
regime in Cambodia and the Thieu regime in Saigon amid ongoing
civil wars. Although his experiences here as a foreign correspondent
later provided the material for the political poems which
catapulted him into fame with the publication of The Memory
of War (1982) (and his 1988 volume of reportage, All
the Wrong Places), Fenton was unable to write poetry about
Indochina at the time. It would have been different, he once
commented, if it had been "one's own war." But to find a war
just to write about it struck him as not only artificial but
disgusting. The youthful prodigy had the material but the
maturing poet needed to find the appropriate perspective.

In
1976 Fenton returned to Britain and became New Statesman's
political correspondent at Westminster. Writing a weekly column
on British politics over the next two years, Fenton became
well-known as a left-wing journalist. At this time New
Statesman had also become the meeting ground for a group
of younger poets who over the next two decades would dominate
British poetry. This coterie included Craig Raine, Andrew
Motion, Christopher Reid, and Blake Morrisonall Oxford
men except Morrison. In the classic manner of a new Oxbridge
generation arriving in London, this group of talented co-conspirators
would play an important part in making one another's literary
reputations. In 1978, however, the editorship of New Statesman changed, and Fenton left to become the Guardian 's
correspondent in Germany.

In
journalistic terms Fenton's time in Germany was a failure.
He found writing about Germany for a daily paper difficult,
and after a year he returned to England with the intention
of abandoning political journalism for good. (Fenton provided
a witty account of his last days as a foreign corespondent
in the introduction to You Were Marvellous, 1983).
His tenure in Germany, however, did revive his interest in
poetry. In Berlin he began sketching out an elegiac prose
poem, which would eventually become "A German Requiem." At
this time he also wrote his most influential piece of literary
criticism, a short article entitled "Of the Martian School."

Fenton's
playfully titled piece announced and defended his selection
of Craig Raine and Christopher Reid as co-winners of the Prudence
Farmer Award for the best poems published in the New Statesman during the preceding year. Discussing Raine's "A Martian Sends
a Postcard Home," Fenton claimed that the Martian's alien
point of view (which provides unexpected and puzzling descriptions
of everyday earthly objects) was not unlike Raine's general
poetic method "which always insists on presenting the familiar
at its most strange." Fenton also pointed out an affinity
between Raine and Reid in their use of startling and original
images. He then wittily dubbed them members of the "Martian"
school, "a school that ought to be noticed, since it has enrolled
two of the best poets writing in England today." Fenton need
not have feared their oblivion. There are few things that
British arts journalism likes more than new literary movements.
The hitherto non-existent "Martian" school of poetry was quickly
noticed by the London press, which enthusiastically debated
the nature and merits of its aesthetic. This unexpected broad-scale
publicity soon made Fentons friends, Raine and Reid,
two of the best-known young poets in the United Kingdom.

The
year 1978 also saw the publication of A Vacant Possession,
the first of several pamphlets that would solidify Fenton's
reputation among poets before the broader acclaim of The
Memory of War. (The chapbook or pamphlet has always been
Fentons true medium, and his poetic development is best
measured by these smaller and more unified gatherings rather
than the larger commercial volumes.) A Vacant Possession is noteworthy for helping to introduce a particular kind of
narrative poem that quickly became popular among young poets"the
secret narrative." In the introduction to Contemporary
British Poetry Morrison and Motion noted this self-consciously
stylized type of narrative by saying, "We are often presented
with stories that are incomplete, or are denied what might
normally be considered essential information." The three narrative
poems in this pamphlet"A Vacant Possession," "Prison
Island," and "Nest of Vampires"were originally conceived
by Fenton as part of a series called "Landscapes and Rooms"
(to which the longer "A Staffordshire Murderer" also owes
its origin). Each of these poems was to describe a particular
landscape and interior via a different protagonist. The larger
scheme was abandoned but not before Fenton had written some
striking poems.

"Nest
of Vampires" is spoken by a young upper-class boy as his family
packs up their belongings to move from their ancestral home.
The child only vaguely realizes the financial ruin of his
bickering family and the mismanagement of their estate, which
has earned them the hatred of the villagers. Instead he imagines
that his family suffers from some mysterious curse which he
might unravel by finding the right clues. The poem plays with
both the literary and cinematic imagery of vampirism (garlic,
mirrors, unspeakable family secrets, dogs whimpering for no
reason). These gothic details not only project the child's
guilty fears but also provide an implicit political metaphor
for the class structure that permitted the landed family to
destroy the villages around them.

These
"secret narratives" are unfailingly interesting
to read but ultimately unsatisfying to revisit. Stylish and
self-assured, they create a brooding sense of atmosphere.
At times they seem novelistic in their ability to present
a welter of observed detail. Here is the opening of "A
Vacant Possession":

In
a short time we shall have cleared the gazebo.
Look how you can scrape the weeds from the paving
stones
With a single motion of the foot. Paths lead down
Past formal lawns, orchards, notional guinea-fowl
To where the house is entirely obscured from view.
And there are gravel drives beneath the elm-tree
walks
On whose aquarium green the changing weather
Casts no shadow. Urns pour their flowers out beside
A weathered Atlas with the whole world to support.
Look, it is now night and there are lights in
the trees.
The difficult guest is questioning his rival.
He is pacing up and down while she leans against
A mossy water-butt in which, could we see them,
Innumerable forms of life are uncurving.
She is bravely not being hurt by his manner
Of which they have warned her. He taps his cigarette
And brusquely changed the subject. . . .

This
is fine descriptive writing cast in sonorous twelve-syllable
lines (a measure that usually seems flabby in English). Yet
the poem never quite rises to the responsibilities of its
own narrative. "A Vacant Possession" seems like
a novella from which the plot has been excised. The characters
never exist in meaningful relation to one another. The individual
incidents do not coalesce into an integrated design. Even
the subtext ultimately remains secret. Despite their masterful
style, Fentons "secret narratives" remain
mostly pure atmospherepoignant, evocative, but also
evanescent. They display the authors considerable stylistic
panache and originality, but they do not represent the work
that makes Fentons strongest claim on posterity. Those
poems were still to come and very soon.

Toward
the end of his journalistic stint in Germany, Fenton had
visited Vienna, where a friend was directing a play at
the Burgtheater. The nerve-wracking excitement of the
play's last-minute rehearsals made such an impression
on Fenton that he decided to seek employment related to
the theater. Returning to England in 1979, he eagerly
filled the newly vacated post of theater critic for the London Sunday Times. This position not only inspired
the lively reviews collected in You Were Marvellous;
his turn toward literary journalism also provided the
final impetus to get Fenton actively writing poetry again.

In
1980 Quarto published Fenton's poetic sequence "Elegy,"
which was based on the sketches he had begun in Berlin. Since
English readers found the poem obscure, he revised and retitled
it "A German Requiem" the next year when his brother Tom printed
the short sequence in a handsome folio for the newly established
Salamander Press in Edinburgh. A German Requiem represented
the first real breakthrough in establishing Fenton's poetic
reputation. Andrew Motion praised it in the New Statesman (where Craig Raine had earlier praised A Vacant Possession),
but more important Peter Porter, reviewing the book in the Observer, prophetically called Fenton "the most talented
poet of his generation" and described the poem as "stately,
composed, almost Eliotesque." The sequence also won the Southern
Arts Literature Award for Poetry in 1981.

"A
German Requiem" is an elegy for both the victims and survivors
of war. Based on Fenton's observations in Berlin and Urbino,
the poem is an oblique narrative describing a visit to a German
cemetery aboard "the Widow's Shuttle," a special bus, to attend
a memorial service for the war dead and the painful meditations
this excursion elicits. The poem progresses through a series
of nine brief and fragmentary sections. The narrator seems
to stand at a distance from the devastation he evokes. He
never speaks in the first person but describes the participants
as you, they, he, and she. (The
only I in the poem is spoken by an unnamed man.) The
narrator "deliberately chooses," as Andrew Motion has noted,
"not to say certain things." Indeed, the particular style
of the poem depends on the narrator reminding readers how
much he chooses not to disclosejust as the poems
characters deliberately choose not to speak about certain
parts of their wartime experiences.

Although
cast as an elegy, the design of "A German Requiem"
becomes clearer if the poem is read as a "secret narrative,"
perhaps Fentons one fully realized poem in the genre.
Like many of Fenton's early extended poems, "A German Requiem"
can seem almost impenetrable unless the reader accepts the
overt evasiveness of its narrator. A deliberately paradoxical
poem, it evokes the memories of war without revealing them.
From the first it insists that the clues to its own meaning
are missing:

It
is not what they built. It is what they knocked
down.
It is not the houses. It is the space between
the houses.
It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets
that no longer exist.
It is not your memories which haunt you.
It is not what you have written down.
It is what you have forgotten, what you must forget.

The
necessity of forgetting is the central theme of "A German
Requiem." While writing the poem, Fenton heard a psychologist
lecture on the difficulty of defeated nations accommodating
the memories of a lost war. Fenton linked this modern psychoanalytic
idea to Thomas Hobbes's observation from Leviathan (1651), which serves as the epigraph to the poem, "that Imagination
and Memory are but one thing." The imaginative process of
selectively recreating the past eventually becomes not only
the survivors' tactic for living with the burden of history
but also Fenton's aesthetic of writing political poetry. Although
"A German Requiem" deals with a political subject, the poem
avoids any specific political attachments or ideology (such
as the international socialism to which the author then subscribed).
Instead, Fenton seeks a broader consensus of common humanity.
The poet is a concerned but objective witness to history.
This carefully nonpartisan reportage also informs "Dead Soldiers,"
Fenton's most celebrated political poem, which was also published
as a pamphlet in 1981.

"Dead
Soldiers" describes an absurdly elegant battlefield lunch
Fenton the reporter had in 1973 with Prince Norodom Chantaraingsey,
the military governor of Cambodia. Also present at the lunch
was an obsequious, drunken aide who eventually proves to be
the brother of Pol Pot, the revolutionary leader who will
soon decimate Cambodia. The poem, which is both a journalistic
account of this incident and a meditation on the impossibility
of a foreigner's understanding the complexities of Cambodian
politics, is narrated in a cool, factual style. Fenton's particular
gift is to heighten the journalism into poetry by a series
of quiet detailsespecially bitter puns and doubleentendresseamlessly woven into the straightforward
narrative. For example, the prince's expensive French brandy
becomes a symbol for the decadence and inhumanity of the prince's
regime:

On
every bottle, Napoleon Bonaparte
Pleaded for the authenticity of the spirit.
They called the empties Dead Soldiers
And rejoiced to see them pile up at our feet.

In
1982, The Memory of War was published by Salamander
Press to the most enthusiastic reception any young British
poet had received since the appearance of Dylan Thomas. Almost
immediately Fenton was hailed not only as one of the most
accomplished poets of his generation but also as virtually
unique, as Jonathan Raban stated in the Sunday Times,
"in having a great deal to write about." Fenton's combination
of technical skill and political insights appealed to a critical
establishment, which saw contemporary poetry as increasingly
marginal in its relation to society. His political poetry
was compared to the work of Auden, Yeats, Brodsky, and Akhamatova,
and he was praised for bringing the prose virtues of clarity,
accessibility, and directness successfully into poetry.

Fentons
immediate success was not altogether accidental, however much
deserved. It also reflected the concerted efforts of the poet's
supporters. Andrew Motion published a lengthy interview with
Fenton in Poetry Review to coincide with the book's
publication. (The issue even featured an earnest portrait
of Fenton on its coverwearing a bardic scowl worthy
of John Milton). The Memory of War was chosen as a
Poetry Book Society Recommendation before publication. Fenton's
work also was featured prominently in Motion and Morrisons
controversial but immensely influential Penguin Book of
Contemporary British Poetry, which appeared within months
of The Memory of War. This anthology announced a new
generation of British poets which marked a decisive shift
in sensibility and demanded "for its appreciation, a reformation
of poetic taste." These editorial claims were greatly overstated
since the poets included in the Penguin anthology neither
cohered as a literary group in any meaningful sense, nor did
the direction of their work appear particularly rebellious
since Auden and Larkin seemed to be their predominant influences.
Nevertheless, these bold editorial gestures helped create
an environment in which Fenton's quick rise to prominence
was possible. And his new work was good enough to bear the
weight of critical scrutiny.

Perhaps
the most unexpected and oddly original success in The Memory
of War is "The Skip," a remarkable narrative allegory.
Like many of Fenton's best poems, this piece works through
unusual combinations of form and content. The voice of the
poem's persona, for example, is conversational and demotic,
but it speaks in strictly rhymed heroic quatrains. Likewise
this sustained allegory unfolds in a contemporary working-class
neighborhood. Through these original juxtapositions Fenton
creates a memorable comedy with the accessibility of a popular
song and the integrity of a lyric poem. Telling the story
of a cynical young man who literally throws his life away
("skip" is English slang for the large garbage containers
Americans call "dumpsters"), the poem lightheartedly chronicles
the narrator's despair and redemption in a casual manner closer
to Kipling than to contemporary poetry.

I
took my life and threw it on the skip,
Reckoning the next-door neighbors wouldn't mind
If my life hitched a lift to the council tip
With their dry rot and rubble. What you find
With skips isthe whole community joins in.
Old mattresses appear, doors kind of drift
Along with all that won't fit in the bin
And what the bin-men can't be fished to shift.

Amid
the stark political poems and macabre secret narratives that
made up the opening section of The Memory of War, "The
Skip" seems oddly out of place. But it would prove a
prophetic poem for Fenton. Its combination of comedy and violence,
slangy diction and traditional meters, narrative form and
symbolic intent, presage his later political satires like
"Cut-Throat Christ" or "The Ballad of the Iman
and the Shah." These poems astonishingly rehabilitate
the populist mode of Kiplingused to very different political
ends. They also demonstrate that Fentons greatest originality
is not found in his boldly experimental gestures like "Exempla"
but in his highly individual combination of traditional elements
to create unmistakably contemporary effects.

The
Memory of War was followed in 1983 by Children in
Exile, a short collection of eight poems of remarkable
variety. The book opens with "Wind," one of Fenton's finest
short lyrics. An apocalyptic poem, "Wind" counterpoints
the timeless image of wind in a field of corn against the
catastrophes of history.

This
is the wind, the wind in a field of corn.
Great crowds are fleeing from a major disaster
Down the long valleys, the green swaying wadis,
Down through the beautiful catastrophe of wind.

"Wind"
is followed by the sardonic "Lines for Translation into Any
Language," a boldly experimental piece which turns a numbered
prose list into a powerful political poem. These poems deal
with political subjects but in an unspecific, universalized
way that helps prepare the reader for the delicate balance
of the title poem, which tries to present the victims of a
particular political upheaval with apolitical compassion.

"Children
in Exile" is a discursive poem about contemporary politics
that aspires to recreate in modern terms the accessible but
dignified style of eighteenth-century English verse. Written
in a form invented by Fenton (a quatrain which alternates
lines of free verse and rhymed pentameter), the poem, is according
to the author, "a pastoral eclogue with political content,"
which owes its general conception to Thomas Gray's "Elegy
Written in a Country Churchyard" (1751). The poem describes
the painful but eventually successful transition of a family
of four Cambodian refugees (a mother, two sons, and a daughter)
who have escaped "the justice of Pol Pot" to live with a wealthy
American family in northern Italy. Like the survivors in "A
German Requiem," these refugees must learn to deal with the
past which still haunts them in their dreams:

They
have found out: it is hard to escape from Cambodia,
Hard to escape the justice of Pol Pot,
When they are called to report in dreams to their
tormentors.
One night is merciful, the next is
not.

One
of Fenton's most refreshing accomplishments has been his nonsense
verse. Almost half the work in his American selected volume, Children in Exile: Poems 1968-1984, is light or nonsense
verse, including some of the best poems in the collection.
Especially interesting has been his revival of the Audenesque
genre of the apocalyptic nonsense poem. This genre typically
starts in a brashly comic manner but slowly modulates into
a nightmare vision, as in Fenton's "God, A Poem, " which begins:

A
nasty surprise in a sandwich,
A drawing-pin caught in your sock,
The limpest of shakes from a hand which
You'd thought would be as firm as a rock,
A serious mistake in a nightie,
A grave disappointment all round
Is all you'll get from th'Almighty,
Is all you'll get underground.

The
ironically playful treatment of serious themes gives Fenton's
best nonsense verse the resonance of poetry in ways which
could not be accomplished merely by ingenuity of language.
Indeed a subtext of nihilism runs through his light verse.
Even the titles of his nonsense poems, such as "This Octopus
Exploits Women" or "The Killer Snails," often reveal a dark
side to his imagination. In "The Song that Sounds Like This,"
a poem which like "A German Requiem" deliberately avoids stating
its central theme, Fenton deals with depression and ennui
(just as "The Skip" coyly plays with the themes of self-destruction
and despair). Likewise in "The Wild Ones" Fenton turns gratuitous
violence and sexual assault into farce by recreating a Grade-B
motorcycle gang movie with a cast of South American rodentscoypus
and capybaras. But even here the cartoon animal farce has
an unexpected apocalyptic ending when the violated rodents
give birth to freakish monsters:

Months
later, all the females have attacks
And call the coypu doctors to their beds.
What's born has dreadful capybara heads.

In
1983 a combined edition of The Memory of War and Children
in Exile was published in England under the title of Children
in Exile: Poems 1968-1984 and appeared in America the
next spring. This volume, which contained all of the poems
which Fenton wished to preserve, solidified his reputation
in the United Kingdom and earned him the most enthusiastic
reception a young British poet has had in America for decades.
In the New Republic, Stephen Spender called Fenton
"a brilliant poet of technical virtuosity" while Geoffrey
Stokes in the Village Voice claimed his poems "aspire
to greatness legitimately." In the New York Review of Books Seamus Heaney agreed that "Fenton's voice signals the emergence
of a new poetic generation," while A. Poulin, Jr., in the New York Times Book Review calmly reported that Fenton
"already has all the earmarks of a genuinely major poet." Newsweek even listed Fenton as a possible candidate
for the Poet Laureate (which would ultimately be offered first
to Philip Larkin and later accepted by Ted Hughes). Needless
to say, Children in Exile was an amazing debut for
a poet who had been unknown in America six months earlier.

While
Fenton was not then a serious candidate for the laureateship,
he was at that time actively campaigning for an almost equally
prestigious position, the Oxford Professorship of Poetry.
Originally endowed in 1696, this professorship has had a distinguished
list of occupants including Matthew Arnold, F.T. Palgrave,
W.H. Auden, Robert Graves, and C. Day Lewis. The professorship,
which carries a five-year term and is elected by a convocation
of Oxford M.A.'s, provides the victor with only a meager salary
but an influential public platform. At thirty-five Fenton
was one of the youngest candidates in the professorship's
history, but as an Oxford resident, he ran a popular campaign
promising "to revive Auden's willingness to function as a
campus poet." Ultimately Fenton lost the election to Peter
Levi, another Oxford insider, but polled more votes than his
distinguished elders Gavin Ewart and FT Prince. Fenton's disappointment,
however, was undoubtedly softened by his receipt of the 1984
Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize on the eve of the election.

Fenton's
place as one of the foremost poets of his generation now seems
assured. His work has achieved a broad readership on both
sides of the Atlantic, and at readings and conferences he
has assumed the role of a leading young man of letters. Likewise
his reputation has spread beyond the world of poetry. His
controversial translation of Verdi's Rigoletto set
in Mafia New York during the 1950's has toured both England
and America (and recently been recorded), and he is currently
finishing a version of Simon Boccanegra. His celebrity
status was confirmed in Redmond O'Hanlon's popular comic travelogue, Into the Heart of Borneo (1984), which recounted a
bizarre and fascinating trip the author took with Fenton into
the primitive interior of the island. While Fenton has published
little verse since Children in Exile, he has never
been a prolific poet. Like Philip Larkin, he has distinguished
himself by the consistent quality rather than the quantity
of his verse. Where his future work will lead is impossible
to predict, but it is safe to assume that it will be carefully
read. Whether this fame proves a burden to his poetic development
only time will tell, but success is surely an easier burden
to bear than its alternative.